Centripetal
by TamsinBailey
Summary: The external force required to make one body follow a curved path around another.


**Title: **Centripetal  
**Summary: **All orbits decay towards the center, even Gibbs and Abby.  
**Spoilers: **None. Or possible the whole show, depending on how you look at it.

**Author: **TamsinBailey

**Author's Note: **As usual, nothing belongs to me. If you would like to sue, remember I work for the federal govenment and have no money. Hope you enjoy!

The first time they met he had not been impressed. She stood in the forensics lab with her hand outstretched, radiating a joyful anarchy. It was somehow elemental to her. Not just the black lipstick and chains but something that shown through her pale skin and the fluid way she moved. The part of him that was a Marine recoiled, lip curled with disdain.

She had smiled at the dismissal in his eyes. Other people have judged, it said, and will again. His disapproval was nothing more than the motion of the tide to her and it rankled. He found himself probing the idea of her again and again, like a tongue to a sore tooth.

They found a routine. Familiar but not comfortable. He made demands and she supplied results, but only after she had rambled and side-bared to the point where he ground his teeth to keep from shaking her. As if baiting him was some kind of sport and winning a snarl that could Marine Captains blanch was the match point.

He used her like a tool specialized for a task that could be accomplished with any number of far less cumbersome, by which he meant irritating, stand ins. Until a man stole a Navy brat into the night. He and his agents charged the field, beating the bushes and detaining cars while the ticking clock turned their fury to agony. Thirty hours into the search, six past any reasonable expectation of life she had called him on the radio spewing an incomprehensible babble about ions and dye markers. A trail of microscopic breadcrumbs she had followed from bedroom to a basement cage. A pair of tiny hands had been wrapped around the bars when they burst in.

She was still in her lab when he had returned to file his report, curled up in an office chair. Her eyes had opened when the doors whooshed apart and her face brimmed with hope. He nodded and her smile had been so brilliant that it overpowered the tattoos and the smudged black lipstick. He smiled back with shared relief and her lips had curl up in delighted surprise. He decided it suited her.

He learned slowly. She worked best with loud music and caffeine and her hands sometimes carried the harmony of her spoken words. Teasing was a mark of her approval and not bestowed on everyone. Her wide open enthusiasm looked like a refusal to put aside childish things and was actually a firm conviction that maturity was not the slow concession to petty hurts and larger damages. She looked into the darkness that most cringed away from and believed the things that growled and slashed back could not hurt her. He did what he could to make sure she was right.

The annual Christmas party (not the first year and maybe not even the third) and someone had joked about the vampire coming out of the basement. He had seen in the thin line of her mouth what her refusal to be anyone but herself could cost. He caught her elbow and pulled her away to a restaurant worthy of their tux and fancy gown. When the wine came he toasted beautiful women and she looked at him with careful appraisal and did not smile. At the end of the night he kissed her cheek and she threw her head back to scream Merry Christmas into the night with sparkling eyes and her breath steaming. He held her from tipping backwards and smiled to know how perfectly his hands fit into the hollow of her hips.

He brought a new agent down to her lab and watched his shuttered cop eyes take in her near pure transference of caf-pow into kinetic energy. She bounded across the lab vibrating from caffeine and rattling off a long string of chemicals that proved his killer was not in fact his killer. She skidded to a stop in front of him, hands clasped demurely together and eyes full of knowing the impression she was making on the man standing beside him. He kissed her cheek for the privileged of it and knew her smile was for the perfection of things that come full circle.


End file.
